Underlord: Descript’s AI Video Editor, with CEO Andrew Mason

Hello and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Erik Thornberg. Hello and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, my guest is Andrew Mason, CEO of Descript, the AI-powered video editing platform that's revolutionizing content creation by making it as easy to edit video as it is to edit a text document. As you'll hear, we at the Cognitive Revolution are longtime users of Descript. It's an integral part of our production process, and we can sincerely attest to its radical ease of use. In this conversation, we get into the details of how Descript is using AI to reimagine the content creation and editing process. This is a journey that began with a novel editing interface built on top of AI transcription technology and has since expanded to include a variety of post-production techniques, including AI custom voice overdubbing, the AI eye contact model that makes it appear as if I'm looking directly into the camera right now, while in fact I'm reading from a document, as well as a number of editing shortcuts that remove pauses, filler words, retakes, and more. Collectively, Descript calls this suite of AI features Underlord. A clever bit of branding that's obviously meant to imply that Andrew and team want to keep humans at the helm of the content creation process. Along the way, we also touch on Descript's partnership with OpenAI and Andrew's perspective on AI-generated content. And I also share some details about how we're using AI workflows at the Cognitive Revolution. For those, I have to give the bulk of the credit to our production team led by Addy and Sai from AI Podcasting. I've been working with these guys for the last six months, and they have both worked really hard to not only produce the eight or more episodes that we publish each month, but also to build AI workflows that streamline the process and create distribution leverage. The short clips that I post on Twitter, for example, are the outputs of an AI workflow. AI creates six to eight of them for each episode, and then I choose and post my favorite one or two. You can read my full testimonial on their website, AI Podcast. To be clear, I do not have any stake in the business, but I do sincerely recommend them, and they are now open to taking on additional clients. So if you need podcast production help, you can feel free to ping me for more information or contact them directly. In other news, I've received roughly 40 resumes from listeners who are interested in new AI engineering or AI advising roles over the last month. This week, I finally had the chance to catch up and review everything that I received, and I'm now starting to circulate lists of relevant resumes to Those include Athena, the executive assistant company that I've mentioned many times on the show, and also Elicit, the 2-time past guest that's building a market-leading AI research assistant, among others. I believe I've now responded to everyone, but if you did submit something and haven't heard back from me, please do ping me again to let me know. As always, if you're finding value in the show, we'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to share it with friends, and we always appreciate your reviews on Apple or Spotify. Thanks, Nathan. Now, without further ado, here's my conversation about building an AI-powered software product that changes how a great many people work with Andrew Mason, CEO of Descript.

Andrew Mason, CEO of Descript. Welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

My pleasure.

I'm excited about this. I think you guys have a great product. We at The Cognitive Revolution are regular users of it and got some interesting questions, hopefully, that kind of get at where this is all going in the big picture, as well as some of the stuff around how it works today. For starters, I'd love to just hear kind of your big picture, long-term vision for Descript. Obviously you guys just recently launched the Underlord feature, which I thought was inspired branding from the standpoint of, you know, not threatening the users too much. But I always feel like this, there's a really interesting tension for tool companies where it's like you're enabling service providers in many cases, but with the AI features, like, does this sort of converge on becoming more of a service itself? So I'm very interested in your thoughts on that.

Yeah, totally. So I think we created Descript because creating audio and video content increasingly was feeling as fundamental as creating text content. As the platforms got better for distributing that stuff, but it was getting no easier to make. And about, I don't know, 8 years or so ago when we started thinking about this, as transcription quality was getting better, we saw the potential to reimagine what an editor looks like for audio and video, where instead of being this timeline, which not only has like quite the learning curve, it's just irreducibly slow to work in, you could make something that felt like the one tool that everybody understands how to use, a doc. And by doing that, our hope was that we could put video and audio in everyone's communication toolkit and kind of complete this journey that creation has gone on from only being in the hand of creative professionals to now also being something that creators use, to something that every, like, knowledge worker and communicator. can use. And this whole thing has been enabled from AI from the start. And now in our generative AI world, we see it as this like incredible companion that can just take even more of the tedium out of the process. Like in theory, making this kind of content should be easy. It's the easiest thing in the world to just open your mouth and speak, but looking and sounding good is the hard part. And that's where we think AI can really help.

So maybe run down some of the favorite features that you guys have launched. I mean, I'm a big user of the pause removal and the filler word removal. Those are like 2, you know, first ballot Hall of Fame features for me. I've recently seen also the retake removal. What are your favorite tools? What are the most popular tools of users?

Well, you named some of the really popular ones. Another one is a feature we have called Studio Sound. A lot of people, especially like guests on podcasts, right, don't have access to a great recording environment. They might have a mic, but still be in an echoey room. That's one of the hardest things because if you're not like a trained producer, you might not even have the ear to realize, like, you know that it doesn't sound like the stuff you hear on the radio, but you couldn't begin to say. Why or how to fix it. And Studio Sound is this AI effect that will, it's not just noise reduction. It's like literally trained to take something that sounds like it was recorded on a computer mic, whether there's background or whatever, and make it sound like it was recorded in a studio with a professional mic. So people really love that. A couple others that have really been transformative for my workflow. So I make a lot of scripted, like how-to kind of videos or explainers where I'm talking to the camera and The process of reading a script is like really tedious. Like the workflows I used to see creators do would be that they would like have their script off camera and they would like read a sentence or 2 at a time and then memorize it and look at the camera and then pause and pause. And it's just an editing nightmare. Or you can get a teleprompter, but it's like a whole setup that most people aren't gonna bother with. And a teleprompter is like, I don't know if you've ever tried, it's like hard to read off. It's like a skill. To read off a teleprompter. So we have this feature called eye contact, which is creepy, but it's so cool. It lets you read off of your screen, just like out of a Google Doc or whatever. And then you turn on eye contact and it looks like you're talking to the camera. So that's been like super transformative. I'll, I'll write like a really rough draft of a script and I'll hit record and I'll like stop and rewrite parts of it as I'm reading and I'm feeling it out. In, in the way that I'm speaking. And then at the end, we have this remove retakes feature that, that is powered by Underlord, where it is smart enough to be able to tell, oh, it looks like they're just saying the same thing multiple times here. So I'm going to edit out everything except for the last take and clean that up. So that's a favorite feature I have. Another feature I really love is the ability to record over AI speech. So. Sometimes I will write a script directly in Descript and add visuals as I'm going, kind of like storyboarding it out and using an AI speech version of myself or just like a stock speaker. And in order to have like a rough draft, because normally when you're making videos, like the normal process for people is you kind of have to compartmentalize. You're writing your script and have another doc or like you've set up a table or something where you're doing your storyboarding and talking about what the visuals are. But the really cool thing about Descript is We kind of break all the traditional barriers between pre-production, production, and post-production. You can do post-production and do your visual layout as you're writing and then have a scratch visual. And then at the end, you can record your camera on top of that and it'll transcribe what you just said and line it up and position all of the layout changes properly. We don't do a good job at like making that feature super obvious in the app, which is why one of the reasons I like to, to mention it because it's another super transformative workflow thing.

Yeah, I want to understand it a little bit better actually, because the way I do my intros, including the one I'll do for this episode, is I take the transcript of the podcast and I take 30 intros that I wrote for previous episodes, put that into Claude 3.5, sign it now, have it write a new intro for this episode.

Oh, really?

And it's quite good. It needs that 30 examples of my previous writing, but it really kind of— I feel like it gets me and it's pretty cool.

What does it get wrong if you don't give it the 30 examples?

It doesn't—

I mean, it can summarise reasonably well, but it doesn't match style.

I have a certain cadence where I sort of say the same things a lot of times in the same order. Like, I always say, welcome back to the Cognitive Revolution. I always kind of close out with a couple notes and then say, now here's my conversation with the guest. I also sort of have a little bit of a— won't be such an issue for this episode, but in some of these episodes where it's like, how should we feel about this? Should we be excited about AI doctors, or should we be fearful of AI doctors, or should we be fearful of AI in general? I sort of have a very both sidesy vibe, which is sincere, but I always kind of try to channel both my enthusiasm and my what I would describe as healthier.

Just to give that kind of nuance that people would expect.

Yeah. If I have a particular point of view on a particular episode where I'm like, I want to communicate this exactly, then I have to add that to my standard prompt. But if it's like for an episode where it's pretty down the fairway, like here's a founder or a researcher and we kind of go through their work, it does a really nice job of just matching my general format, pulling out the key points. But then I read it and I typically do like a couple takes beginning to end.

So how do I do that in the Descript workflow that you just described?

We have a write feature in Descript that will just do your standard issue generative text based on a prompt. The cool thing, what we should build for you is what you've described, which is we use your historical podcast episodes to be able to write an intro for you that sounds like the intros that you've done. And then it can just spit that out at the top of your transcript. And then what you would do in Descript is you would just select it and record over it. I don't know that it adds that much value versus just leaving it in a separate doc in your use case, because where it's really cool is when you've added visuals upfront, right? Like if you had an intro where that was like a couple minute intro and you knew you were switching to some different layouts where you wanted to show a visual overlay or some B-roll or something like that, you could do all that when you're writing and then record over it and it would preserve those visuals. But if it's just like a straight one-shot, like intro recording, then there's not much we can do to improve on that other than making the writing process easier.

Yeah. Interesting. I mean, maybe I should do more. Usually I think most people listen to this in pure audio. We do put it on YouTube, but I always say, If you are getting it on YouTube, you should put the phone in your pocket because it's not healthy to look— to spend that much time looking at my face. So it'd be better to have something, you know, other than just my ugly mug sitting here staring back at people. We do use the eye contact feature for that most of the time, at least. And I do think that is quite nice and mostly comes out in a way where I wouldn't feel like I know the difference. I would say on the studio sound, This is kind of a window into a bigger picture question, maybe in terms of like product strategy. We've recently been really enamored with the new ElevenLabs model that is kind of like an audio cleanup. And I would say, at least of all the things that we've tried, it's probably the market leader. So we now, like, if necessary, we'll take the audio to that, run it through, and then bring it back into Descript for the editing. I wonder how you think about being a hub or a place that people can tap into all these other tools, even if you didn't necessarily create them, versus wanting to sort of build and create. Because my understanding is the Studio Sound seemed like something that you had created internally. Maybe that's wrong, but is there a future where I could plug into these external purpose-built models from other providers within the core editing experience?

Yeah. We don't have any religion about building our own stuff. Frankly, we would rather not. You'll notice when we do build our own stuff, we're not releasing APIs for it in general. That just hasn't been a part of the strategy. We see ourselves as building the best creation tool out there for people. And our goal is to offer the best integrations that let people use whatever the state of the art is that's out there. So we'll be adding more text-to-speech voices from other providers very soon. More generative media libraries pretty soon and want to do more and more. And yeah, if something comes around that's better than Studio Sound, that sounds great for us, like less time spent on building those things. We build them because they're useful to customers and people don't have them. So there's stuff like on text-to-speech where text-to-speech shows up in 2 ways in Descript. One is in this thing that we've branded as Regenerate or Overdub. That where you can go in and select a word that you spoke and then change the word, like in the middle of a sentence. And that is unique to Descript. Nobody else has built something like that. And there's some really specific stuff that we do around blending the generated speech into the same prosody and sound quality of the audio that's on either side. So it sounds very natural. On the other hand, for general long-form text-to-speech, complete sentences, there's now stuff that's every bit as good as Descript, and we want to give people more options there, more voices. And so we'll be integrating that.

Yeah, cool.

Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors.

The API point that you mentioned was actually one— so I work with a couple of guys who are basically a small podcast production agency. They call themselves AI Podcasting. I was drawn to them because they're very committed to using the latest and greatest AI tools. And in addition to doing a good job for me, they also bring me lots of ideas and we trade ideas and so on. So one of the things they wanted me to ask you is about API access. They would love, and this may be very rare, but they would love to be able to build their own sort of external workflows and then hit the ignore endpoint. Because most of what we're doing is cutting and, you know, ignore all these things based on the heuristics that we've developed. But then we still love, and I kind of feel like we sort of have to have the ability to go in and see in a visual way what was cut. And that's why I think the ignore thing is like a really good format because it's so easy to see and it's so easy to restore. Sounds like you're gonna break their hearts though. No API.

No, not necessarily. It, it's not that we're— yeah, maybe that's true. Is that not coming soon? We're not against it. It's just a priorities question. That sounds like a cool workflow. So it sounds like what they want to do is they've built their own kind of version of some of the script editing AI actions. I'd be curious to learn more about what it is, but another way to do that would be to have kind of extensions or presets inside of Descript that let you use different models or type in different prompts or whatever, and then save those so that you don't need the API access. Is that something that would be—

Yeah, I think it would probably work similarly. It probably doesn't matter in the end too much if it's Posting in the edit changes or calling out to get them and implementing once they're returned is probably just 2 routes to the same place. I think we've experimented with a lot of things. They do fine-tune models for specific clients to really edit in the way that that client wants to have things edited. They also do this for clips. And this is where the editing gets even more intensive, right? Because we'll try to figure out what is the right viral clip for us to zero in on? And then how do we kind of get that under 60 seconds, ideally, right, to fit under certain thresholds for different platforms? And now you're talking like economising on the level of 1 second here, 1 second there. And so we've created examples of that, few-shot, many-shot, and even fine-tuning. to try to zero in on what are the clips that we feel are working for us or that sort of satisfy my idiosyncrasies in some cases, right?

Yeah.

Because each client wants to kind of present themselves in a different way. So we have some, for example, where it's like, my theory is, and I don't necessarily have data for this, but I feel like when we post a clip, people who follow me know my face. They don't necessarily know the guest face, but of course the guest is like the real star. So we try to do a real quick— and as you can tell, I talk too much on my own podcast, so You know, my questions are usually too long. So we try to shrink my question down into like the first couple of seconds and then get the guest on to let them shine. So these are the heuristics that we're kind of trying to encode. And it's like a little bit more than we can prompt within the, and I got to start saying it the way you're saying it, which is Descript.

Am I saying it that way? I try to mix it up.

So say it however you want to say it. I've put the emphasis on the script. But, you know, we've kind of gotten into this, right? So there's a little bit more that we're trying to do than we can just prompt into that system, but we do ultimately want to bring it back there because we want to see it. We want the visuals, and it's that last— often there's like a tweak, right? So we could pipeline this out, and we've tried doing that where we actually, okay, we get all these suggested edits. Now we could programmatically make them with FFmpeg-type tooling.

Yeah.

But that sucks at the end because if you don't love it, You have a really hard time going back, right? So the dream would be the Descript output based on those workflows. Yeah, no, it sounds cool what you're doing.

I would love to actually talk to those guys and brainstorm a little bit about what we can do. Also, this is the weirdest podcast. I just feel like we're doing a customer call, but I love it. It's great if this works for you.

Yeah, I get into the weeds of how things work and most people that listen are, you know, my Another standard joke is it's not entertainment. So it's for people that are building a lot of times and then also in research, but really trying to amplify.

I'll talk about this all day, better than telling you the 3 things I learned from Groupon.

That was going to be one of my— I have that down at the bottom of the outline, so maybe I should cut that. But hopefully I'll make it more relevant than most. Okay, so this is cool. I wanted to get into also a little bit of OpenAI partnership, that's obviously something you guys have taken investment from them, a pretty significant amount, right, as I recall. And obviously they're selling frontier intelligence, and if you have a couple million bucks to put down, custom models. I was interested in sort of, are you working with them on custom models, trying to really push the possibilities of what language models can do in the editing workflows?

Yeah, I think They saw how generative AI was exciting across audio, visual, and text mediums. And Descript is interesting because it sits at the intersection of those things. So Sam was just a big believer that this was going to be a space where you could have a lot of fun and do some really interesting stuff using the sorts of things that they were building. And also that Even as this stuff got better and better, having a tool with human-shaped controls where the human can get in there and practice their craft alongside the alien wasn't going away anytime soon. What the relationship has looked like has been more or less like a standard early investor, but then We get to have conversations with these people who are working on the cutting edge of what's going on, help us understand where things are going, get early access to some stuff, but that's it. It's pretty standard, pretty basic stuff.

So that sounds like a no on a custom model. If so, that's— or is it a no comment?

I can't even comment on that because I'm not even sure what the research teams right now are aren't working on with them. So it's a no comment from a place of ignorance.

My gut says that could be really compelling. They have an interesting talk out with— it's actually a member of the OpenAI team talking about their partnership with Harvey. And they claim to have, through continued pretraining on legal data, have gotten to the point where they had a 97% preference ratio of their legal-specific model versus the original GPT-4 base that they were working from. And it does feel like something similar is probably on the cusp of possible for editing, where I would imagine what we see, certainly in our own, without nearly as much data as you would have potentially access to and not nearly as many hours to put into it, We see there is a lot of value in even just fine-tuning. And so I could imagine if you have a billion hours of intensively edited content that you could sort of work from, that seems like it could create just a qualitatively different experience.

For sure. We've seen that as well, and we're moving to largely fine-tuned models for most of our actions at this point.

This is one of my new favourite questions for entrepreneurs. I think you'll have an interesting take on it. What would a 10 times more expensive version of the product look like? If we said, we're going to push performance to the limit, no matter how much the inference, how many tokens that may take, what do you think are the frontiers?

Well, the obvious answer to that right now for us is in generative video, which is still quite expensive and cost prohibitive for A lot of the use cases that would be interesting, which are like, I mean, the way we think of video is that most videos are mostly window dressing with brief glimpses of actual content appearing on frames, like information appearing on frames. If you think about it, like this video is a great example. The visuals are just us, our heads are just like about engagement, but it's not adding very much at all to the substance. Maybe at some point we could throw up a chart or something like that, and that might be some actual information. And I think generative video has a lot of potential for solving that window dressing problem that creating videos have. If you think about turning a doc into a video, there's the speech part, which you can either use AI speech, which has gotten quite good and is pretty affordable. You can also record it, which isn't that hard, but creating the visuals is the hard part. And we've started to see some experiments in generative window dressing, the most prominent of which is like synthetic avatars. But I think that's just like the most obvious possibility of what someone could do. And there's a lot you could do with animation and other forms of generative video that I think are pretty interesting.

Yeah. So Sora in a word would be Where some of those—

Sora, like Runway, you know, like why haven't we integrated Runway? I think it's just because it's like $10, something like that per minute of video. Just really limits what you can do with it for our customers, especially for stuff like this where like, you know, you think about the way you use a tool like Midjourney or something. There's a lot of back and forth experimentation. Like those tools work because they're not zero shot.

Yeah, it's certainly a skill unto itself. One thing I thought you might say too is, or maybe this is already happening under the hood, it's not totally obvious to me. I assume the original version was, as you said toward the top, transcribe first, now process transcripts. Multimodality is obviously coming online in a very powerful way. I assume you've had some early access to the voice mode, and one imagines that the ability to put in raw audio along with perhaps a transcript or perhaps even raw video could be quite a game changer in terms of the quality of manipulation that you could get back from the AI. So what do you think the next— that's allegedly coming soon to all of us. What do you think that is going to mean for Descript and content creation broadly?

Specifically multimodality and AI that can see and hear? Yes, we're excited about all that stuff. I don't think that gets us to the 10x more expensive threshold. At least we haven't envisioned a way to make it that expensive for ourselves or our customers yet. But in short, I think what it does is it lets our editing assistant get smarter. Like right now, all Underlord can do is read your script and make a bunch of guesses on what's happening on the screen or what's happening in the audio in order to make suggestions. And I think when it's actually looking at the frames and listening to intonation and things like that, then the possibilities just get richer in terms of the different styles that it can take on and it gets more accurate.

Yeah, it seems like that's going to be a big, big deal. I'm looking forward to the voice mode just so I can go read research papers while walking around my neighborhood instead of having to actually be planted in front of my computer. So it seems like that's going to be a huge unlock. You mentioned fine-tuning. You're kind of trending toward fine-tuning for more and more tasks. On this sort of 10x more expensive theme, what about fine-tuning to the user? Is that something that you see in the scope of possibility?

Yeah, it's something that's definitely on our radar. I can't say too much about it yet, but you just earlier kind of started this podcast with a great example of how powerful something like that could Potentially be. So it's certainly something that we're thinking about.

Yeah, my Claude prompt is 10 cents basically with the full transcript and the 30 examples. And so, you know, that's in the zone where, especially if you do have a couple iterations or a couple back and forths, you could get up to 30, 50 cents. That starts to feel like the kind of thing where you have to take it into account to some extent, especially if I'm making a number of Which I'm making, we're doing 8 a month. So it starts to be like into the dollars for you if you built in something along those lines. But at the same time, there's still plenty of room. If you imagine you put that under the 10x more expensive heading, it still gives you like a ton of room to run.

Yeah. Yeah, no, that's not too bad. Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors.

What about bringing, this is like maybe crazy, but I've been starting to think about having GPT-4o voice mode co-host with me in some way, shape, or form? Maybe it coaches me in the background, maybe it actually pops in, maybe it has my outline and sort of says, this would be the time to ask that question so you don't have the awkward pause like I just had. I don't really love fully AI-generated content in most cases, but I wonder if you have a vision for a more hybrid approach where you have this real-time co-host potentially.

Yeah, I mean, we think that's another really interesting idea. It's something that we've talked about a little bit internally, but can't say too much more about it at the moment other than say that sounds cool.

Okay. Maybe just zoom out for a second. What is like the breakdown of who creates content with Descript? Is it mostly like podcasters or like how often do you see people doing different? What's the sort of customer profile breakdown?

It's a mix between podcasters. Podcasters and creators, like video content creators, a lot of people that are making educational content, like explainers and how-tos, tutorials. Descript has a built-in screen recorder that you can either use Loom style to just fire off a quick video message, but it's also really great for recording overlays on top of a narrated screencast kind of thing that you're making. In businesses, we see marketing teams use it. We see it being used for internal training materials. So that's a pretty good overview of the types of people that are using it. And they're using it to create, in addition to just straight up podcasts and video content, they're using it like to repurpose that stuff into clips and promo content.

So what else do you think those folks need? One idea that occurred to me, and this is kind of my own AI video background speaking, but it seems like Monetization for these folks is typically quite a challenge. I've been fortunate to be part of this Turpentine network, and they handle almost all of the sponsorship sales, so that takes a real load off of me. But in general, I feel like people both have a hard time selling and then also creating the high-quality sponsorship content that they would want to integrate. Seems like a real challenge. Thoughts on that and thoughts on kind of other things that you think people are really missing as we imagine a world of like lots more creators kind of thriving independently?

Yeah. So we hear that all the time, like monetization, finding an audience is one of the top pain points that you'll ever hear from creators. At least for now, it's kind of outside of our sweet spot and we've got our hands full just trying to make it easier for them to make their content. We also hear like once creators get, you know, past their initial list, just continuing to keep things fresh and come up with ideas for content can, can be a struggle. So those are the buckets, you know, the ideation, obviously like making it easier to make more content faster, and then audience and monetization.

We mentioned that Synthetic voices. Do you see people using things like HeyGen or Synthesia, these sort of AI avatars? I wonder if you have a take on the future of that form factor.

Yeah, we talk about it a lot. What's your take?

Very hard to say. I would say right now it is— actually just did an episode with HeyGen and created my intro for that episode with my HeyGen avatar. And then we also had a weird recording issue where his video was kind of corrupted. And so we actually decided, well, let's go for it and recreated this whole thing with his HeyGen avatar. So we were like, you know, just spent a lot of time with the avatars. I would say it's like late uncanny valley still. It's like getting quite good, certainly for a couple minutes at the top. It seems serviceable. In general, I'm not excited to listen to long-form stuff with it yet. But it seems like It is, you know, potentially not much longer before it could exit the uncanny valley. And then it becomes like very hard to say where it goes as far as I can tell.

And once it exits the uncanny valley, like, do you think that's the thing that's standing in the way? Do you see yourself watching a long-form video of your favorite podcaster as an avatar?

I think it depends on just how good the ideas are.

You know, I'm open to weirdness for sure.

Yeah.

What has let me down most, I think, in AI-generated podcasts to date has been less the quality of the voice that's synthesised or the avatar, and more just that I have not usually felt like there's really any alpha to it. In the episode we just did with Josh from— Joshua, I should say, from HeyGen. He actually said all those things and then we kind of recreated it. So we felt like It was, you know, it wasn't like we were just taking LLM slop and putting it into his voice. It was actually his words kind of recreated. So it was a little bit different. But yeah, I think at the heart of why I haven't been enthused so far has been just the quality of ideas, even more so than the form factor in which it's delivered.

Yeah. You know, we have a kind of like brand value here about staying clear-eyed, being really careful not to believe our own bullshit. on anything. It's so easy when you're building a tech company to get swept up in it all. And we just like don't want to do that. Life is too short. And I think like AI avatars is interesting. It's so hard to predict the future. And I think AI avatars are emblematic of that. There's some companies that have gotten quite large building AI avatars and like these hyper-realistic avatars. And I totally missed it when I saw that. I was like, this is dystopian. Even if you get to the point, like out of the uncanny valley, it's irreducibly cheap. Like it's all the value is for making it scalable for the creator. There's no value as executed for the audience. But I expect, like you're saying, that this is just the first phase of something that gets really interesting. And probably where it gets really interesting is not just in like trying to recreate recreate the previous version of what we had, but using this technology to create something new that we haven't seen before. And that's maybe where this stuff really becomes something else and something special that's not quite as creepy.

Yeah, they have interesting ideas around— I think for me right now, the number one killer use of that kind of thing would be translation, you know, just to think like, if I could translate this whole thing into Spanish, that could open up a whole new opportunity. And even if it is slightly weird, it still feels genuine. They've got certainly much farther out ideas around personalization and choose your own adventure and all kinds of dynamic possibilities that start to get into that realm of like, it becomes a meaningfully different thing. And maybe that just ultimately feels different. But yeah, I think today we're still kind of poking around to figure out exactly what that might look like.

Yeah.

All right. Here's the Groupon question.

Okay. There is one.

You know, small businesses really well.

Yeah.

What do you think they are sleeping on in terms of how they should be using AI that they're not?

I mean, I'm trying to think about that from a Groupon lens. Like I have no idea how like restaurants or, you know, nail salons are using AI. The most obvious thing is it feels like we're in this window of time where AI can really like bring the cost of creating a like 80th percentile quality online presence from videos to your website and stuff like that, really high quality. And so I don't know, I assume that a lot of small businesses are sleeping on that, but I'm not really like, I'm too busy building this, you know, little video app to Haven't been staying in touch with the massage places and stuff that we used to feature on Groupon.

I think it's still pretty safe to say that they are mostly sleeping on it entirely.

Yeah.

Handling routine stuff is kind of where my head goes. Just like soon, if not already, there are going to be good appointment-taking phone agents. And that in and of itself, I think could be a huge unlock for many businesses.

Yeah, I'll say that the kinds of businesses that we deal with at Descript, which are a little bit different than, like, you don't have restaurants buying, like, there were these brick and mortar places buying a lot of like SaaS tools necessarily. They do, but it's just like, it doesn't come to the scale that we're talking to them as much. It's more of a self-service thing. What we see from the slightly larger SMBs and enterprises is that they do have a mandate to go out and integrate AI tools and find AI tools. And they have trouble a lot of times finding something that's actually adding meaningful value for the org. So there's a lot of stuff that's come out that has this magical AI promise, but it might be good at a very one specific type of thing. But when you actually try to integrate it into the org and get people to use it, it kind of breaks down. So that's not to say that AI is some kind of a fad for this thing. From that. I think it's more just like we're still in the process of building all the tools that are going to work really well for businesses.

Perfect transition to what have you learned about hiring AI engineers and how the discipline or skillset of applying AI to product experiences differs a little bit from a more traditional software engineering challenge?

Yeah. So it's a little bit different if you're Having people that are working with LLMs and like kind of wrangling LLMs compared to the people that are building models like we did with Studio Sound or Overdub, especially when we were building those models. One of the interesting things was that like normally when you're building product, you can just like define your requirements, design something, work with engineering and have a pretty good sense of like you can build a product around known engineering constraints. And the constraints on these AI tools end up shifting kind of as the research unfolds. So the user experience that you're building for AI speech model that can be trained instantly is very different from the one that can be trained in 15 minutes, is very different from the one that can be trained in a day. And we've gone through all of those different cycles and we've been working on stuff where relatively late in the development process, something happens where you have a new model that's much higher quality, but instead of taking 15 minutes, it takes 3 hours. And then you have to make those kinds of trade-offs that maybe completely shift the nature of the product. So that's like the big new thing is that level of uncertainty and figuring out how to work that into the development process. The other thing is just how when you're building, when you're doing AI research, you're making a bunch of bets. Some of them are going to pan out, some of them aren't. The ones that don't, you might hit an absolute dead end and just need to start from scratch on a different idea. And you just have to factor that into the way that you build and and run the team is that that's like par for the course.

Yeah, that's very apt. I think I always say with AI engineering, we don't know what's going to work in advance. De-risking is critical. Do the hard part first. And I think you basically said something very similar there. So that's good reassurance for me and for anybody who's listened to me say those things in the past. I know we're just about out of time. Anything else you wanted to touch on before we break?

No, thanks for having me. This was fun.

Cool. I appreciate it. It's been short but sweet. Andrew Mason, CEO of Descript. Thank you for being part of the Cognitive Revolution.

You bet. Thanks for having me.

It is both energizing and enlightening to hear why people listen and learn what they value about the show. So please don't hesitate to reach out via email at tcr@turpentine.co, or you can DM me on the social media platform of your choice.